Tried out a Mac Pro/FCPX with a 4K monitor for about half an hour today. Multiple effects were added to optimized 4K clips and the machine played them back in full-screen without any difficulty what-so-ever. After several effects were already applied to a clip, skimming the cursor over a new one, the Mac Pro instantaneously showed the combined results - so satisfyingly fast! Will attend a workshop to learn more about the new system in the near future!

The delivery date for the Mac Pro, which is designed for the power users in the entertainment industry, has been pushed back more than a month - supply cannot keep up with demand! Personally, I'm not surprised at all.

And Final Cut Pro X just got even better! With a little help from their friends...

For several years I have been using SmartSound to produce royalty-free music tracks for my videos. For those who don't know, it's an intelligent system for selecting and aligning music to video, adjusting moods, timing, etc. The quality and range of music in SmartSound makes it worthwhile. All their music is tagged by style, keyword (e.g. happy, serious, floating, thrill), intensity, tempo and instruments so, if you know what mood you want, finding the right music is fast.

The real beauty of the SmartSound model is that their music is made from separate "lego blocks" of music (e.g start block, variety of middle blocks, end block), so it can intelligently adapt to any length and still sound great. You can build your own library or just buy one track at a time after you've auditioned it.

But, it was always a bit of a chore. Worth it, but still a chore. Had to export the finished video from FCP, import it into SonicFire, put in the music markers, select and time all the music then export the music track to FCPX. Any changes to the video timing usually meant another whole round trip and a few timing adjustments.

Today, I just cut my first video sound track using the plug-in. Talk about fast! Just pop a generator on the FCPX sound track, adjust the length of the generator placeholder to the section where you want a piece of music, then click "generate" and the SmartSound Express Track window opens to let you select the music. When you are happy with the selection, click Send and the music track shows up in the FCP X event library from where you can drag it onto the generator placeholder. Click replace, adjust volumes and you're done.

If you know what style, intensity and mood you want, it can take as little as a minute to soundtrack a section.

The beauty of this approach is the music track is separate pieces, aligned to the FCPX story line. So any timing changes only mean one quick round-trip to change the length of one piece of music. You can even build up the music piece-by-piece, rather than doing it once at the end. This is useful because you might want to change some video to better match the music. All much easier now.